Well, the Gravity Rush 2 Contest turned out much better than I expected. I had seven whole entries from four different people! And they were pretty good!

The winning entry came from Craig G, who cut mercilessly deep with the above revelation. Even so, Gravity Rush lets Kat throw enemy soldiers and average citizens off the edges of floating islands, allowing them to plummet into an ominous void. Perhaps she really is evil after all.

I recently grew fascinated with those rental stickers often seen on old VHS tapes, DVDs, and video games. For many they're an annoyance, a sign that you're getting something that was digested and regurgitated by a hundred VCRs or Nintendo decks. But I like them.

This stems from my ongoing
effort to buy fewer old games. Instead, I just look at them on eBay, where odd
labels and faded warning tags only give cartridges and discs more personality.
You’ll see hundreds of auctions for NES games at any given time, but only one
might be from a long-gone Hastings Entertainment in Aurora, Colorado. A game assumes a greater place in history when it carries an
old rental-store emblem. It’s not just a battered cartridge; it’s a memento
from an age when Blockbuster Videos were as numerous as Burger Kings and renting
a game was a blessed alternative to spending months of allowance on Brawl Brothers
or Valis III.

I picked out a handful of intriguing (to me, anyway)
ex-rental games from eBay, avoiding the more commonplace remnants of Blockbuster
and Hollywood Video. There’s a little story in each one of these.

I love it when something wears its past in price tags.
This Last Battle cartridge served its time at Video Ezy, an Australian chain
that apparently survived the rental crash by embracing kiosks. Games were five
bucks a week (which is about $3.50 in my native currency), and I’m sure a bunch
of early Sega Genesis/Mega Drive owners got their fill of repetitively punching
and kicking post-apocalyptic thugs. No, Last Battle isn’t a very good game. It
was a Fist of the North Star title in Japan, but Sega excised the exploding
heads, rampant blood, and manga-anime license for tender Western sensibilities, and what remained
wasn’t very interesting.

No longer a hot renter, Last Battle ended up in the sales
bin for about twenty bucks. And because that’s too much for a mediocre Mad Max
knockoff, Video Ezy slashed the price below ten dollars. Someone nabbed it at
that point, though I hope they held out for a buy-two-get-one-free offer and
got, say, Forgotten Worlds and Truxton in the bargain.

In my last Little Things, I forgot to mention other small details that I like about Legacy of the Wizard. For example, I like the portrait that the family of playable heroes has on their wall.

There's a lot to enjoy on this screen, which presents the Worzen clan in their domestic forms and shows them transforming into fantasy archetypes once selected by the player. The best is Pochi, the dog who is really a grumpy dino-dragon creature.

However, my favorite piece of their home is that portrait on the wall. It supposedly depicts the bearded and bald ancestor who once sealed away the ancient dragon that the family must now defeat, but that picture also looks like a parrot.